Saturday Apr 02, 2005

Interesting release yesterday. 3DRealms (aka "it'll be done when its done"), in their usual April 1st
humour, released the source to another one of its classic games, Shadow Warrior. Some of us older folks will remember this along with the ever funny DukeNukem. The source has already been ported to use OpenGL here and the icculus.org folks with another port from the original dos to unix,
heres the details. Fast porting, though with Duke Nukem already ported for a while, its not surprising.

Sunday Feb 20, 2005

Finally remembered this site. You've seen t-shirts with the usual comment on them, eg "Been There, Kissed That". That kinds of thing. Well Hairy Baby throws a decent Irish slant on the story. Not your usual Irish t-shirt of the like you'd be seeing in them there tourist shops. This one being a prime example.

One thought seen from the Slashdot posts is a wonder where the AMD64/Opteron/64bit Solaris 10 is. Just like Solaris 9 (on sparc) was/is, the 32bit and 64bit kernels are bundled together in the same release. Downloading the version for x86 will give one the ability to use either the 32bit or 64bit kernels on a AMD64 machine, be it an Athlon64 or Opteron type. All you folks with those Ferrai laptops now have 64bit kernels.

One last item, to actually boot the 64bit kernel on an AMD platform use this command:

# eeprom boot-file=kernel/amd64/unix
# reboot

Off to watch some DVDs this evening on the laptop. Using Solaris 10 of course.

Tuesday Aug 03, 2004

The new version of java (1.5) has sen many improvements. One of which is the performance has increased. A side effect of this was noting that a java app I use was using some amount of memory. The new jvm is getting smart, seeing that it was running on a nice machine (4 cpus and 2GB memory) it decided to itself to run in server mode. Fine, this helps performance. Not so fine if the machine happens to be a server for a few hundred people and a couple of dozen of thos people use this same app. You can see where this is going, the jvm's eat up the memory, leaving little for anything else.

Now the java app it self is launched via java webstart. It can be launched from a webbrowser pointing to a JNLP
page/file. From the command line it can be launched as:

javaws http://location.domain/url/to/the/file.jnlp

One of the entries in this JNLP file is j2se element. It specifies what Java 2 SE JRE to use. This has an addition feature where one can specify some VM arguments for the jvm to use on startup of the application. For example:

< j2se version="1.4+" java-vm-args="-esa -Xnoclassgc"/>

Fine, we can control how the JVM is run.

Now getting back to my memory thing. A java app, using a large amount of memory on
a machine with a nice bit of memory but that memory can get used up fast once a few java apps get launched. Heres the trick:

< j2se version="1.4+" java-vm-args="-client"/>

It runs the JVM in client mode, thus using less memory. Over half the memory in the case of the java app I was using. Its a nice trick I thought.